Electric vehicles have proven to be a viable alternative to gasoline-powered cars. The increasing demand for electric vehicles has placed importance on the development of the associated technology and the planning of an infrastructure that will support the many electric vehicles that will be on the roads in the future.
Most of the electric vehicles currently on the market were designed and manufactured according to a recharging-model, in which a vehicle uses the same, periodically-recharged battery pack over a long period of time. This model suffers from some drawbacks, however, because it requires car owners to allot an amount of time for recharging in which the car cannot be used. Further, planning must be made to ensure that the vehicle is near a charging station when the battery needs to be recharged. This limits the use of the vehicle to certain routes, ranges, and locations.
Vehicles designed and manufactured according to a battery replacement-model, on the other hand, allow a drained battery to be replaced with a charged battery, instead of recharged while connected to vehicle. These vehicles may overcome many of the problems associated with the recharging-model if an associated battery replacement process is otherwise faster than and more readily-available than the alternative recharging process. Moreover, a replacement-battery infrastructure may be more feasible and applicable for at least some implementation areas than its recharging-model counterpart. In order to achieve these goals a viable design would include features that address issues such as standardization, safety, ease-of-use, and logistics. However, current battery replacement-model electric vehicles have yet to find solutions for many of the problems that arise in these areas.
Regarding safety, many current electric vehicle designs rely on a rigidity of a battery pack itself to protect the battery cells from damage caused by a collision impact. For example, U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,210,301 and 9,045,030 depict battery packs for electric vehicles that include integrated rigid frame structures that absorb energy during an impact event to protect the battery cells that are also disposed in the battery packs.
While this configuration may be useful for designs in which the battery pack will be maintained in the same vehicle and recharged when needed, it suffers from some drawbacks when applied to a replaceable-battery scheme. In particular, the internal frame structure adds weight to the battery packs, rendering an associated replacement process more cumbersome and difficult. Moreover, the design requires the battery pack to be precisely positioned within the vehicle such that impact forces are properly transferred from the vehicle frame to the battery pack. These positioning requirements would further complicate and lengthen an associated replacement process.
The present disclosure is directed to overcoming one or more problems of the prior art.